“Shit. They’re fucked” the singer/speaker announces to all of us in “Ron”. The aggression is ramped up pretty high for Tweez. At times it sounds like these guys were just pumping out leftover aggression from their Squirrel Bait days. But that aggression appears to be reaching for something else, something a bit more detached.
“Carol” is one of my more beloved songs on here. It hints at the later, multi-part masterpieces they would later perfect. At the 2 minute mark the music gets wonderfully intense. The guitar screeches out a painful wail as the speaker tells you “when the time comes/you got to let go”.
They were surprisingly young to put out something this experimental. None of them had even graduated from college yet when they got around to making a song that involves hearing a guy swallow a glass of water. A jam starts up, sounding almost like a kind of normal band having a grand old time. Being Slint, this could only last a little over a minute before they wanted to “get sensitive” and talk about Christmas Trees inside their heads.
Lyrically, it doesn’t feel as solid as say Spiderland’s clear narratives. But the weirdness can sometimes lead to a tender sweetness, like it does on “Darlene” probably one of my favorite songs about relationships of all time. That bass comes in and sounds wonderful. Beautiful guitar comes in and the speaker is delightfully nonchalant. Also, they seem to save the darkness for us until the very end of the song, as he feels sad that he lost two friends to each other.
Reaching the end of the album, it gets into darker, even more distorted terrain with “Warren” and “Rhoda”.
I can’t believe how under-noticed this went at the time it came out. Recorded with Steve Albini, who even admits “It sounded alright”. Nobody paid attention to it, so few that it got recorded in 87 and released in 89 by Jennifer Hartman Records, which sounds like somebody working out of their garage. Later on it would be released on Touch and Go, which is where they would find a home for their masterpiece, Spiderland.
PS. If you’re wondering where the album’s title comes from, it was from Britt Walford’s (drummer) habit of collecting tweezers.